Quake, Meet GPL; GPL, Meet Quake

Back in the summer of 2005, id Software released the Quake 3 engine to the public under the GPL license. For open-source enthusiasts, it was amazing news, but to the general public, it seemed like mostly marketing nonsense. Releasing the Quake 3 engine, unfortunately, wasn't the same as releasing the game, so the average gamer didn't gain anything—at least, not at first. In this article, I introduce some great new games that use the Quake 3 engine. They're all free, and they all run natively under Linux.

First, let's talk about what id Software really did when it released the engine under the GPL. As Linux users, we're familiar with terms like, “Free as in speech and free as in beer”. For the record, I have never understood the latter part of that motto. Beer is rarely free. Nonetheless, the Quake 3 engine is indeed free in several ways:

I tried to explain the significance of releasing the engine to non-techie friends of mine, but, alas, they had no idea what I was talking about. So, for those of you who have never really understood the whole game engine versus actual game thing, check out the “Grandma's GPL Cookie Recipe” sidebar.

Before I begin talking about the games, I have a few confessions to make. First, I'm not a gamer. I am the player you want on the opposite team in pretty much any gaming situation. I'm horrible. Second, my computer is just about as adept at gaming as I am. Here are the specs:

I chose Ubuntu because it's very common and easy to use. It doesn't really matter what distribution you have; they'll all work, but some of my examples might not look exactly the same. I'll try to be as generic as possible.

One key issue with getting any 3-D game working is to make sure you're using an accelerated driver in the X Window System. It's possible your computer already has this. A simple way to check is to open a terminal window and type:

# glxinfo | grep endering <enter>

And, look for:

# direct rendering: Yes

(I purposefully left off the r in the grep statement, in case the word Rendering happened to be capitalized.) If you don't have direct rendering, you need to configure your video card for acceleration before you can run any of the games covered in this article. In my case, I had to change my video driver to “intel” instead of “i810”. You might have to do some research on the type of card you have. Most semi-modern video cards are capable of acceleration in Linux, so it likely will be worth the effort. Now that you (hopefully) have your video system running properly, let's get down to the games!